Mideast Peace Effort Pauses to Let Failure Sink In

WASHINGTON — On May 2, a week after peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians fell apart, senior American diplomats gave an interview to a prominent Israeli journalist in which they said Israel’s aggressive pursuit of new Jewish settlements had sabotaged the negotiations.

While the officials were not identified, one was widely assumed to be Martin S. Indyk, the Obama administration’s peace envoy. But it might as well have been President Obama himself, a senior administration official said, since the White House cleared the interview and the critical remarks faithfully reflect the president’s own views.

Mr. Obama, stung by his second failed attempt to broker a peace deal, has decided to take a conspicuous breather from the Middle East peace process, this official said, “to let the failure of the talks sink in for both parties, and see if that causes them to reconsider.”

While the president believes there is time for another American-led peace initiative before he leaves office, the official said, he is determined to wait until the Israelis and Palestinians approach the United States with their ideas for how to revive a process that has stumbled along, in a familiar cycle of futility, for more than three decades.

That means it is unlikely that Mr. Obama will lay down principles for resolving the conflict, as he did in May 2011 after his last major effort to forge a peace agreement deal foundered. At that time, he proposed a formula for negotiating the borders of a new Palestinian state.

Publicly, Mr. Obama has said that both sides bear responsibility for the latest collapse. But the president believes that more than any other factor, Israel’s drumbeat of settlement announcements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem poisoned the atmosphere and doomed any chance of a breakthrough with the Palestinians.

“At every juncture, there was a settlement announcement,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “It was the thing that kept throwing a wrench in the gears.”

For now, Mr. Obama has instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to shift his attention to nuclear negotiations with Iran, which are heading into a decisive phase; the crisis in Ukraine; and the longer-term American strategic shift to Asia — a policy that has gained urgency with the president’s recent trip to the region.

During a recent trip to Israel, Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, focused mainly on the nuclear diplomacy, which is also a priority for the Israeli government.

The White House has not undertaken a review of its peacemaking effort, the senior official said, because the reasons for its failure are straightforward. The administration also wants to make clear to both parties that “they have a door that’s open,” he said. “If they want to walk through that door, we’ll be there to work with them.”

That has left Mr. Indyk and his small team of State Department negotiators in a kind of limbo. Officials said it was likely that he would return to the Brookings Institution, where he has been vice president and director of foreign policy, in the coming weeks. But he is likely to remain “on call,” should the negotiations be revived.

For Mr. Kerry, who made the peace process the capstone of his diplomatic agenda, the question is whether he will make public any of the framework that he hammered out over the nine months of talks. That has not yet been decided, an official said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kerry met the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in London. State Department officials said it was not an effort to jump-start the talks, but a “touch base” encounter, in part to manage tensions that have risen since the Palestinian Authority began reconciliation talks with Hamas, the militant Islamic group.

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Mr. Kerry also met with Tzipi Livni, the Israeli justice minister who led the nation’s negotiating team and was in London for meetings with British officials. But the secretary of state has no plans to visit the region, an official said, and is focused on two trips to Asia this summer.

The Palestinian reconciliation talks prompted the Israelis to suspend the negotiations. Both sides have since furiously blamed the other for the breakdown: The Palestinians point to settlements; Israeli officials insist that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made significant concessions while Mr. Abbas basically “shut down.”

The White House is sympathetic to that criticism. In a March meeting with Mr. Abbas in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama tried to sell him on Mr. Kerry’s framework. The Palestinian leader, officials said, did not respond, preferring to reiterate his rejection of the Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“The president was skeptical about a deal after that meeting,” the official said. “Abbas was more comfortable pivoting to public grievance than focusing on a private negotiation.”

In a speech last week at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mr. Indyk drew a distinction between the Israeli government and Mr. Netanyahu, who he said took substantial risks. “He moved; he showed flexibility,” Mr. Indyk said. “We had him, I think, by the end of that process, in the zone of a possible agreement.”

But Mr. Netanyahu, he said, was undermined by members of his coalition, who pressed ahead with settlement announcements that he said “had a very damaging effect.”

“And, by the way, it was intended to have that damaging effect,” Mr. Indyk said. “The promoters of the settlement activity were the ones who were adamantly opposed to the negotiations, even though they were in a government that was committed to the negotiations.”

That analysis closely tracks the comments by American officials to Nahum Barnea, a widely read correspondent for the Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. That interview caused ripples in Israel that have spread since Mr. Indyk’s speech.

Last Friday, an unnamed senior Israeli official complained to Reuters that Mr. Indyk had done little to advance the Israeli-Palestinian talks and was guilty of hypocrisy, since he knew Israel would continue settlement construction during the negotiations.

On May 4, two days after the White House-sanctioned interview appeared, Mr. Indyk took his staff to see “Camp David,” a new play about the 13 days of intense diplomacy, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, that produced the Camp David treaty between Israel and Egypt.

The parallels between that negotiation and the one that just ended were uncanny, according to one of the people in the group. “The characters change,” he said. “The issues don’t.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2014, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Mideast Peace Effort Pauses to Let Failure Sink In. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe